Monday, February 24, 2003

Austin Nights: Blog Day's Four Spare Hours in Austin10:25 PM CST (Link)
Eleven years ago in May, Mel and I came to Austin for a weekend trip. It was love at first sight. One month later, we packed up all our stuff and moved here. We had little beyond our love for each other (corny, I know, but it's true) and our love of this town. I had a part-time job lined up. Mel was unemployed and looking.

We had plenty of spare evening hours to kill, very little money, and no cable TV or Internet to enthrall us. So we spent a lot of time looking for bargain places to eat and cheap or free entertainment:

Dinner at Sandy's (burger, fries, and drink for $1.99 on Thursdays and Saturdays). Or Tuesdays at the Texas Chili Parlor, where you could get two-fer hamburgers. (I never had the courage to try their flaming-hot chili.) Sometimes we would splurge and go to Green Mesquite for BBQ or El Mercado on South First Street.

Then on to Chance's (early for a cheaper cover charge) to sit outside in the summer heat and listen to music echoing off the outdoor stage's the limestone cliff backdrop. Or we would prowl Liberty Books, a local gay/lesbian bookstore, for reading material and information on what was happening in the community, and then take stroll through Whole Foods at its original location. Sometimes, we would continue with a walk-through of Eclectic, a funky import store that used to reside at 12th and Lamar. We used to get fun, cheap stocking stuffers at Eclectic.

Or we would drop a couple of dollars in the gas tank of our red Chevy S-10 pickup and drive around for a couple of hours, looking at all the neato neighborhoods and discussing where we wanted to live when we were finally able to afford a house.

As the years went by, we found our lives more involved in family, work, home, and pets. (We finally bought a house -- a fixer-upper that is not our dream home by any stretch of the imagination -- but it's ours and it's in South Austin, which we love.) We don't get out as much now and, of course, most of the old haunts have changed.

Sandy's Thursday/Saturday special continues, although it's 50 cents more. A bargain, still. Chances is now Club DeVille. Liberty Books is gone. Whole Foods moved into fancy new digs a couple of blocks away, with a parking garage and everything. Now they are looking to move again, into even fancier digs. Eclectic moved down the street, too. In my opinion, both lost a lot of their charm when they decided to go after upper-scale dollars.

Can you still find Austin charm in four hours? Let's see...

Take a drive. Austin's neighborhoods remain a wacky and wonderful mix of rich/poor and urban/rural, despite the gentrification going on in some older neighborhoods. Wander through Hyde Park. Check out Clarksville or Tarrytown. Drive down South First Street.

You can still have dinner at El Mercado or Green Mesquite, although prices have gone up quite a bit. After dinner, check out the Cathedral of Junk in South Austin.

Have some Amy's Ice Cream. Yes, even on a cold, blustery day like today.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that the Austin we fell in love with is still here, somewhere, buried under the dust of the dotcom bust. You got four hours? Go find it!

(Posted in conjunction with Austin Bloggers' Austin Blog Day.)

Tuesday, February 18, 2003

Damn, I'm good...11:17 PM CST (Link)
At being mediocre, that is.

At some point in your life, you resign yourself to the fact that there are things you will never do, places you will never go, and people you will never be. I reached that point a couple of years ago, when the severe pain and crunching sounds in my knees turned out to be marked (remarkable, as the nurse said) arthritis of the kneecaps.

Maybe that’s the midlife crisis everyone talks about--the moment you realize you’ll never be all that you could have been. Unfortunately, I’m still waiting on my little red convertible and the blonde trophy 'wife' in the passenger seat. (Not really. My partner, Mel, would kill me if I came home with another mouth to feed. I still want the convertible, though.)

Still, every now and then I think of the person I am and the person I always wanted to be. I always wanted to be funny. I always wanted to write funny stuff and sing funny songs and tell funny jokes. But really, I'm not all that funny. At best, I'm mildly amusing.

My little sister is so much funnier than I am. I love puns. I have my standards (cow and chicken puns are so mooving and yet, so fowl) and can throw in a good impromptu pun every now and then. But Christi can tell a story so well you nearly die from those pains you get in your side when you laugh too much.

One time she told a story about putting on some corset she decided to wear to improve her posture while horseriding. We were sitting around the kitchen table, as we usually do when family gathers, and she started in on this long tale of elastic woe. By the time she was finished a half-hour or so later, there wasn't a dry eye or a dry seat in the room.

Her email messages are hilarious. I regularly have to wipe tears of laughter from my eyes after reading her descriptions of the escapades of her neatnik young son who goes nuts because of microscopic specks of dust on the rug or her rambunctious, overweight dachshund whose favorite activity is raiding the diaper pail.

Mel is so much quicker of thought and tongue than I am. I live in awe of her skill. She can rip you a new one and make you smile while she's doing it. When she's done, you think you've been given the best compliment ever. Until you walk away and think about it for a while, that is. I love her SO much.

No matter what other profession or career I decided upon in my childhood, I always wanted to be a writer. My first efforts at fiction stunk and were promptly rejected by several magazine editors. Other than a few terribly manipulative, tear-jerking children's stories and the occasional essay, I haven't written anything in a creative vein in 10 or so years. Imagine my surprise when I learned the other day that Mel has been writing stories for the couple of months. And she's good. Really good. And I'm jealous. Really jealous.

I guess it all boils down to one thing: I'm not the best at anything, really. I'm a pretty good tech writer, but I'm a big-picture person and I'm not much for picking nits. I'm a pretty good punster, but I'm certainly not the best at dishing out the punishment. I'm a pretty good spouse-equivalent, but I'm sure I drive Mel crazy sometimes with my little piles of papers and stacks of books littering my trail.

So maybe, instead of being the best at doing something, I’m best at making people better than me. If it weren’t for me, maybe Christi wouldn’t have had the humor training she had. If it weren’t for my encouragement, maybe Mel wouldn’t think she could write as well as she does. Maybe, I’m the wind beneath their wings.

Does that mean I'm full of hot air?

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